Fun Monday - When I grow up

Irish Coffeehouse is our caffeinated hostess this week and she has come up with an interesting challenge for us:

Careers- Then and Now

THEN: As a child day dreaming of what your future would hold for you, what did you want to be when you grew up? Did you ever pursue or achieve it?

NOW: If you could be trained and placed in any career beginning tomorrow, what would it be?


I am probably like so many little girls... When I was young, I dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. It all started when I picked up this book:

He made it sound so... interesting and fun and wonderful! So I set out upon the journey to become a vet (and being one in rural England would be SO great!). I spent one summer volunteering at my family's vet. I cleaned cages, fed animals, held them during examinations and even took part in a surgery (just handing instruments over and watching). Doctors Deloney and Sanders were very nice about my being there and talked to me a lot about what it took to become a vet.

But after that summer... I don't know exactly what happened. But I didn't want to be a vet anymore. Perhaps it was having to put so many animals to sleep and realizing that I could do it once in a while but not all the time. Maybe it was the abused animals that passed through on their way to being euthanized because no one wanted them or they were too badly hurt to recover. I've been following Angela's story about Morph avidly - watching this abused/neglected lurcher becoming healthy again and cheering wildly inside at every stride forward Morph is making.

I love animals. Cats. Dogs. Rodents. Fish. Turtles. I take very good care of the ones I have and mourn for those who are not so well taken care of - and that's one reason I thought I'd want to become a vet. But my heart was too vulnerable for that kind of work.

I still take my animals to Doctor Sanders. He's taken care of my pets for most of my life. He is always impressed with them, how relaxed they are when I bring them in. They never cry or scratch or try to bite. Apparently they are very different from his other patients, and I wonder if it is because of my own attitude about going to see the vet. I do it because I love them.


Now, I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not sure what career I would choose today if I could be trained and placed in a new one. I landed in my current career by accident because I couldn't make up my mind what I wanted to do with my life. I am lucky in that I landed on my feet with something that I could feel passionate about and do for long time because it was so varied.

My current job actually isn't all that varied if you read the official job description, but I have made it so throughout the years by volunteering to work in production or wear the big character costumes, help out with pledge drives, do voice-overs and take on responsibilities that aren't necessarily part of my job description.

I suppose that that is the key to me. I can't do data entry for 30 years and be happy. I need to move around and be creative, to do different things and fail or succeed because I tried it. My job allows this. I've won awards for some of my work. I've been on a national committee that determined some of the uses of technology in broadcast television (but digital television is not my fault!!! I can explain it to you but I didn't make it happen). I've been a public speaker, a private voice, a writer, a talent, and... a database manager.

Whatever course I would/could choose for my career has to allow lots of change and experimentation. It's part of the reason I want to be a writer. I can be or do anything with enough research. Then I just have to put it down.

I wonder if it was the veterinarian part or the writing part that I took away from James Herriot?